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Talking to a co-worker, who used to work in customer service at a different US wireless carrier, this is common practice. His example was customers who use tera

Talking to a co-worker, who used to work in customer service at a different US wireless carrier, this is common practice. His example was customers who use terabytes of data a month would get throttled for the remainder of the period, similar to what Verizon's proposing. It'd be interesting to know how much data the top 5% of users use.

jcr 16y ago
Your post is overly optimistic, but your oversight of "terabytes" is entirely due to Verizon refusing to elaborate on the details of their data plans or how they work in practice. On plans sold as "unlimited" there is actually a usage cap. When the cap is exceeded, bandwidth throttling is employed through the end of the monthly billing cycle. For the newer $50/mo data plans, the cap is 5GByte/mo. For the newer $80/mo data plans, the cap is 10GByte/mo. The data transfer tech currently deployed by Verizon is EVDO Rev.A in most places. Some areas only have the older EVDO Rev.0 deployed. The new new Verizon LTE ("4G" I hate that definitionless acronym) launched in December 2010 is only available in some areas, but they're still building out that network. The typical download throughput I see with EVDO Rev.A is 1.1Mbit/s. If I hit the bandwidth throttle point by exceeding the cap, the download throughput drops to 200Kbit/s.
- pyre 16y ago
  I think that the post you're replying to may have confused the target of the throttling. The comment would make sense in the context of Verizon FIOS rather than Verizon Wireless.
  - jcr 16y ago
    Yes. Though he specifically mentioned "wireless" he probably confused land-line broadband services with wireless services. In the case of "Verizon" (parent company), "Verizon Wireless" is an entirely separate company from their other broadband and landline holdings. I actually have both "Verizon Wireless" service and a "Verizon" landline phone, but there's no way to get just one bill for both.
mdasen 16y ago
It's impossible for a user over a 3G connection to pull terabytes a month. Assuming 1Mbps, you would be able to transfer 8.6GB per day or 259GB per month if it was always on. Even if you hit the 3.1Mbps theoretical max of EV-DO every second of every day for a month, you'd be shy of a terrabyte. I've had friends who have worked on a network and it isn't unusual that the top 5% of users use 50% of the capacity, but 3G devices can't transfer terrabytes even in theoretical scenarios. I'd estimate that the top 5% of users starts between 1GB and 1.5GB. AT&T has said that the 65th percentile is below 200MB and the 98th percentile is below 2GB. Usage is likely exponential, but even plotting linearly gets you to 1.6GB for the 95th percentile. So, at most it's 1.5GB, but it's likely considerably below 1.5GB. 1GB, 1.25GB: those figures seem to be likely.
- jcr 16y ago
  If you sit down and thing about it from the perspective of a service provider building and maintaining a network with limited wireless spectrum, you'd see how a limiting the "Top X%" of users would work very poorly. Overall usage continually increases, and typically increases faster than network capacity can be added. In the specific case of Verizon Wireless "broadband" data plans (e.g. the plans based on EVDO rather than 1xRTT), back in 2004-6 Verizon (mistakenly) sold the plans as "unlimited" only to start terminating customers who actually used it as unlimited and creating new cap-limited plus paid-overage plans. This resulted in a lawsuit where the old "unlimited" customers were allowed to keep their "unlimited" contracts (without being terminated or paying overages), but if excessive use was detected, the connection would be throttled back until the end of the current monthly billing cycle. This arrangement with old customers actually worked out surprisingly well for both Verizon and its customers. The customers don't need to worry about surprise bills for "overages" and Verizon can still manage their network resources and investments reasonably. The new Verizon iPhone4 "unlimited" plans are essentially the same deal offered to the old "granfathered-in" customers. If you exceed the 5GB cap, the bandwidth is throttled down to 200Kbit/s for the remainder of the monthly billing cycle (and potentially the next billing cycle). Assuming full-time/full-capacity usage, the 200Kbit/s throttle means you're reduced to roughly 1GByte/mo. The problem is, many people mistakenly believe a cellular-based wireless data network is only used with phones. This isn't true. It's understandably tough to imagine someone using a phone to transfer many GB of data each month, but since the wireless network is used for a lot more than phones, particularly backhauls and personal computers, bandwidth varies a great deal between customers depending on their needs/situation. The result is, the "Top X%" metric is entirely misleading due to the variance in use-cases. Pulling "X%" numbers out of thin air is misleading at best. Worse yet, LET has a theoretical maximum speed 1Gbit/s, so 5.4 TERABYTES is possible per month. Of course, neither Verizon nor any other commercial LTE network is currently running near theoretical max, but that's beside the point.

jcr 16y ago

Your post is overly optimistic, but your oversight of "terabytes" is entirely due to Verizon refusing to elaborate on the details of their data plans or how they work in practice. On plans sold as "unlimited" there is actually a usage cap. When the cap is exceeded, bandwidth throttling is employed through the end of the monthly billing cycle. For the newer $50/mo data plans, the cap is 5GByte/mo. For the newer $80/mo data plans, the cap is 10GByte/mo. The data transfer tech currently deployed by Verizon is EVDO Rev.A in most places. Some areas only have the older EVDO Rev.0 deployed. The new new Verizon LTE ("4G" I hate that definitionless acronym) launched in December 2010 is only available in some areas, but they're still building out that network. The typical download throughput I see with EVDO Rev.A is 1.1Mbit/s. If I hit the bandwidth throttle point by exceeding the cap, the download throughput drops to 200Kbit/s.

pyre 16y ago
I think that the post you're replying to may have confused the target of the throttling. The comment would make sense in the context of Verizon FIOS rather than Verizon Wireless.
- jcr 16y ago
  Yes. Though he specifically mentioned "wireless" he probably confused land-line broadband services with wireless services. In the case of "Verizon" (parent company), "Verizon Wireless" is an entirely separate company from their other broadband and landline holdings. I actually have both "Verizon Wireless" service and a "Verizon" landline phone, but there's no way to get just one bill for both.

mdasen 16y ago

It's impossible for a user over a 3G connection to pull terabytes a month. Assuming 1Mbps, you would be able to transfer 8.6GB per day or 259GB per month if it was always on. Even if you hit the 3.1Mbps theoretical max of EV-DO every second of every day for a month, you'd be shy of a terrabyte. I've had friends who have worked on a network and it isn't unusual that the top 5% of users use 50% of the capacity, but 3G devices can't transfer terrabytes even in theoretical scenarios. I'd estimate that the top 5% of users starts between 1GB and 1.5GB. AT&T has said that the 65th percentile is below 200MB and the 98th percentile is below 2GB. Usage is likely exponential, but even plotting linearly gets you to 1.6GB for the 95th percentile. So, at most it's 1.5GB, but it's likely considerably below 1.5GB. 1GB, 1.25GB: those figures seem to be likely.

jcr 16y ago
If you sit down and thing about it from the perspective of a service provider building and maintaining a network with limited wireless spectrum, you'd see how a limiting the "Top X%" of users would work very poorly. Overall usage continually increases, and typically increases faster than network capacity can be added. In the specific case of Verizon Wireless "broadband" data plans (e.g. the plans based on EVDO rather than 1xRTT), back in 2004-6 Verizon (mistakenly) sold the plans as "unlimited" only to start terminating customers who actually used it as unlimited and creating new cap-limited plus paid-overage plans. This resulted in a lawsuit where the old "unlimited" customers were allowed to keep their "unlimited" contracts (without being terminated or paying overages), but if excessive use was detected, the connection would be throttled back until the end of the current monthly billing cycle. This arrangement with old customers actually worked out surprisingly well for both Verizon and its customers. The customers don't need to worry about surprise bills for "overages" and Verizon can still manage their network resources and investments reasonably. The new Verizon iPhone4 "unlimited" plans are essentially the same deal offered to the old "granfathered-in" customers. If you exceed the 5GB cap, the bandwidth is throttled down to 200Kbit/s for the remainder of the monthly billing cycle (and potentially the next billing cycle). Assuming full-time/full-capacity usage, the 200Kbit/s throttle means you're reduced to roughly 1GByte/mo. The problem is, many people mistakenly believe a cellular-based wireless data network is only used with phones. This isn't true. It's understandably tough to imagine someone using a phone to transfer many GB of data each month, but since the wireless network is used for a lot more than phones, particularly backhauls and personal computers, bandwidth varies a great deal between customers depending on their needs/situation. The result is, the "Top X%" metric is entirely misleading due to the variance in use-cases. Pulling "X%" numbers out of thin air is misleading at best. Worse yet, LET has a theoretical maximum speed 1Gbit/s, so 5.4 TERABYTES is possible per month. Of course, neither Verizon nor any other commercial LTE network is currently running near theoretical max, but that's beside the point.